Vladimir Putin: no more the strongman

The explosive reaction in Moscow to Putin's election shows the limits of his pseudo-state

Vladimir Putin has tears in his eyes as he addresses supporters, while Dmitry Medvedev stands nearby, during a rally in Manezh Square near the Kremlin in central Moscow on Sunday. Photograph: Mikhail Voskresensky/REUTERS

Monday 5 March 2012 16.30 EST
First published on Monday 5 March 2012 16.30 EST

Projecting an image of control is essential in Russia, a country where many citizens are happy to avoid attracting unwanted attention by publicly siding with whoever holds the reins of power. Until recently, by far the most persuasive way for Vladimir Putin to project that image was to steal elections without triggering massive public protests afterwards. Going by today's events, it looks like things have changed. I write this having just left a massive opposition protest taking place at Pushkin Square: ringed by police and metal barriers, the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny is whipping up a crowd with the chant "Putin: thief! Putin: thief!" The last time Moscow saw protests like these, they were aimed at the Duma – this time, the anger is viscerally directed at the leader himself.

Managed democracy enhanced Putin's strongman image not because it simulated democracy, but because – by delivering sky-high official results in favour of Putin, his surrogate Dmitry Medvedev and his party United Russia – it simulated management. Without elections reliably rigged at all levels, Putin would have had a much harder time convincing the public that he exercised any serious control over Russia's anarchically self-serving officialdom.

Putin's previous legitimacy formula was first tested in early December last year, when a falsified parliamentary vote triggered a wave of public protests. True, he had no trouble rigging the presidential election, if only by making sure that no plausible competitor could arise or get on the ballot; but he can no longer count on the inhabitants of Moscow reacting with fatalistic resignation. So how, given the inevitability of protest, is he going to manage the electoral aftermath so that Sunday's disputed vote displays his power and not his weakness?

Russia is a country where a nascent political society is suffocated by a total lack of functioning political institutions. That the rubber-stamp Duma is not a serious legislature is obvious. More profoundly, the presidency itself was revealed to be an empty facade when Putin handed it over for a term, minus its powers, to Medvedev. And Putin's attempt to turn United Russia into a governing party foundered so badly in the December elections that he ran his presidential campaign without even mentioning the party of which he is the ostensible founder and leader. Not even the FSB (the successor to the KGB) seems to have enough institutional strength to control its own officers.

Understanding the institutional wasteland is essential if we are to make sense of the violent reaction caused by Putin's announcement, on 24 September, that he was looking to return to the Kremlin for a third term. What this announcement conveyed was that Russia has no system of rules by which one president can be succeeded by another: the transfer of power remains a matter of personal choice by the ruling elite.

The absence of any plausible succession formula is the central flaw in Putin's current pseudo-state. From the viewpoint of Russia's voters, it confirms the feeling that Russia is a country without a future, or at least is a country in which the future has no reliable institutional basis, but is constructed wholly upon the unpredictable survival and physical health of a single mortal man. When Putin said "Glory to Russia!" to the crowd gathered on Sunday night at Manezh Square, he meant glory to a Russia that can see no way to go forward without Putin himself.